What is Influencer Marketing?

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Influencer Marketing is everywhere right now and is fast becoming a critical part of the online marketing mix.  So what is it?  Nicola Snell, MD of Press Loft, gives us a summary of this booming industry:

Influencer Marketing is all about getting your brand’s message out to a larger market by inspiring key influencers to get the word out for you. It’s the modern day face of PR.

What is an influencer?

Putting it simply, someone with influence…. yes really (!) and the reason they have to influence is that they have a big audience.  Influencers, in the digital marketing world, mainly means bloggers, vloggers and social influencers – so someone with a following on social media – Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

Collectively, these influencers have HUGE volumes of loyal and engaged followers and an endorsement from them will promote your brand message to your target audience in a much more organic and natural way than traditional methods ever could.  

How to do Influencer Marketing:

To get a big influencer to promote your products, there are a number of things you can look to do:

1. Paid/sponsored posts – where you pay someone money to feature your product.

2. Product reviews/gifts – you give someone a product to keep so they can take photos and/or write about the product.

3. Giveaway – you give someone a product(s) to give away as a competition prize to their audience.

4. Reciprocal promotion – you write / post about an influencer and he/she writes a post on you in return. This only tends to work when you have more followers than the influencer you are talking with and so is not particularly common.

5. Unpaid posts – you ask someone (nicely) to write about your product.  This used to be very easy but now, as the influencer economy is becoming more sophisticated, it is increasingly hard to get unpaid coverage on social channels as increasing amounts of brands are prepared to pay for posts – so you need to compete with them.

Sometimes the best influencer collaborations are when you give the influencer creative freedom to come up with their own ideas for promoting your product in a way they think will engage with their specific audience the best, so don’t be afraid to ask them for their thoughts and maybe even combine a few of the above methods into one campaign.

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What is Press Loft?

Press Loft  www.pressloft.com is a PR platform specialising in the home, gift, and lifestyle sectors that helps thousands of brands to get their products into the press.

Their PR tools allow companies to easily secure press coverage and quality backlinks for SEO by connecting with their network of 20,000+ journalists, bloggers, and influencers.

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